Celtic looked like they were ready to pull themselves back into the title race with a strong showing for the first hour at Ibrox this afternoon. However, Nir Bitton’s sending off resulted in Celtic slipping to a 1-0 defeat to Steven Gerrard’s Rangers. The defeat, Celtic’s third in a row in this fixture, extends the lead held by Rangers to 19 points and all but ends the 10IAR hopes for Neil Lennon’s team.
However, there will be a small degree of hope going into a small winter break. Whether the team should be going to Dubai is another issue but the team will depart for UAE today in the hope that they can carry out a post mortem on what has gone wrong in the first half of this season.
January offers Celtic to recruit for next season and get rid of want away players. They should be looking at building a plan for next season and finding out who they want to get into the club. Players like Ryan Christie and Olivier Ntcham who have been touted with moves should be allowed to depart the club so the club can start a rebuild.
Neil Lennon wasn’t at fault for a lot of went wrong today. The red card mainly. However, Lennon should have remedied the weakness when defending set pieces as once again, Celtic conceded. The substitutions were weird, especially when Celtic conceded. Much like the Cup Final, panic set in after the red card and the fluency and confidence of Neil Lennon’s team fell off a cliff.
For all that Celtic dominated the first hour, they couldn’t find the breakthrough. Edouard was quiet, Griffiths had a shot saved by Alan McGregor whilst Callum McGregor scored the only goal of the game – at the opposite end.
January has started very poorly, despite a hungry first hour at Ibrox. The failings in recruitment, most notably Barkas and Duffy can be remedied in January and Celtic can have a run of fixtures to get some points on the board and apply some pressure to Rangers.
There are two games against Rangers left, the gap sits at 19 points (with the 3 games in hand), providing Celtic can win every remaining game in the league and Rangers slip up a few times, it could be manageable but it would take a miracle.
The league is gone. Time to build for next season. Sack Lennon and bring in a top class manager who can be given time to assess what he’s got and which players want to leave. He can begin to develop the style of play he wants and, in the summer, the Board needs to back him with quality signings of his choosing.
Sounds like a good blueprint, doesn’t it? It won’t happen with this Board. Lennon will be allowed to waste the January transfer window, we’ll get all the rubbish about how the League isn’t finished until it’s mathematically impossible and we’ll lose our best players in the summer with no forward planning on how to replace them. And, lo and behold, we’ll get knocked out of Europe early and not win the League next year either!
Waken up and smell the coffee we need a clear-out they are a poor team